Since Tuesday’s announcement by Eskom CEO André de Ruyter that stage 6 power cuts were on the cards (and then they abruptly kicked in), my nerves have been fraying at the edges.
In spite of my best efforts to forestall the surprise of rolling blackouts by memorising the many bureaucratic “stages” of this disgraceful chapter in the recent history of SA’s monopoly power utility, my anxiety still spikes every time the lights go out.
During this week’s chaos I found myself googling “load-shedding anxiety”.
My insomnia is back. I have become obsessed with keeping my phone fully charged. I am now an expert in the capacity of my laptop battery: if I keep the music player on to drown out the eerie silence, and lower the screen brightness to give my eyes a respite, I can eke out four hours of work before it dies on me. Video calls with colleagues abroad have become an endless succession of self-deprecation and apologies about dropping off when my internet connection suddenly dies.
Yet I am one of the lucky few in SA who can hack their way through this mess. What about those who cannot?
What about students trying to prepare for their exams, and small businesses which depend on security of supply to deliver on their production outcomes? How many have been mugged, raped or assaulted as a consequence of criminals having access to the same schedules we do, which tell them when vulnerable people will be walking home or walking to school in the pitch darkness of the winter mornings and evenings?
How is everyone coping with the unrelenting stress of it all?
In 2020, research from the Council for Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) indicated that rolling power cuts have cost SA as much as R338bn over the past 10 years.
We can count the material and economic costs of both the chronic mismanagement of the national power utility and of its systemic gutting by the hyenas in the government of former president Jacob Zuma. But how damaging is the endless electricity insecurity for SA’s psyche?
We often quantify the effects of policy — its successes, failures or unintended consequences — in economic terms. Yet public policy rarely considers the effect of government decision-making on the mental health and wellness of a society.
The pandemic went a way towards closing this gap in analysis, and it’s not difficult to see why. The rapid implementation of harsh regulations such as social distancing, prolonged quarantine and self-isolation in the wake of the virus’s spread necessitated an urgent analysis of their effect on mental health, particular as poor mental health outcomes often lead to a deterioration physical health outcomes.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), research suggested that people with mental health disorders who got Covid were more likely to suffer “hospitalisation, severe illness and death” than those without.
The WHO also estimated earlier this year that the pandemic has triggered a 25% increase in anxiety and depression globally, which it called a “wake-up call to all countries to step up mental health services and support”.
The effects of Covid on the mental health of the global labour force — from financial uncertainty for those sent home to isolate to the risk of infection for health and essential workers on the front lines of the pandemic — have resulted in increased research on the subject, offering policymakers a toolkit with which to start to consider the effects from more than an economic perspective.
For a country with a tortured and traumatic history such as ours, SA has never had much of a robust public discourse on mental health — especially with respect to public policymaking. This seems to be in stark contrast with the attitudes towards the subject in SA.
To commemorate World Mental Health Day in October 2019, the Policy Institute at King’s College London partnered with Ipsos, the global market research firm, to gauge global public sentiment about the importance of good mental health in a society. SA was the only African country in a group of 29 countries surveyed, and SA respondents were consistently among the most tolerant in their attitudes towards mental wellness.
They were most likely to agree that governments should take mental health more seriously; that mental illness is an illness such as any other; that we need to adopt “a far more tolerant attitude towards people with mental illness in our society”; and that seeing a mental health professional is a sign of strength, not weakness. Fully 76% disagreed with the statement “increased spending on mental health services is a waste of money”.
SA is still working through the devastating consequences of its oppressive and repressive history. The stress, disruption, misery and uncertainty that are the consequences of millions of lives lived in the shadow of bad policy and failed delivery can only accumulate over time to damage the national psyche more profoundly.
The lessons learnt from the pandemic offer an important framework with which to start to measure and respond to more than just the economic effect of government policy and delivery. We need to spend more time and resources engaging with the impact of weak government, corruption and lack of service delivery on our people’s mental health and wellbeing.
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